When Katherine Wilson passes out in the arms of the hottest man she’s ever seen, it’s not because of the lights, the pulsating music, or the crowded dance floor. It’s because she can’t enjoy a night out like a normal person, not with her debilitating anxieties. These panic attacks are going to destroy her life unless she takes control—or gets a helping hand. So after the club’s bad-boy owner personally escorts her home, Katherine feels something urgent and primal awaken inside of her.
Nick Moreno doesn’t need a headache like Katherine. A drug bust has put his father behind bars and forced Nick to take over the daily business of his family’s South Beach nightclub. His head tells him to walk away—but his body has other ideas. Katherine’s vulnerability, her grace and courage, compel him to reach out. And when they kiss, Nick is overcome by desire: to pull her close, and promise that his embrace will always be the safest place on earth.

With a female lead who battles very, very severe PTSD and an anxiety disorder, ‘Pull me Closer’ is both unsettling and provocative enough to keep me at a loss for words – and at a loss how to rate this book. I don’t exactly know how to write a review for this, not just because it puts a debilitating illness in the spotlight, but also because the entire story is constructed around this uphill climb and a woman’s efforts to break out of it – and realistically, not always succeeding.

Katherine Wilson’s story unfolds in the sweaty, claustrophobic spaces of a nightclub, immediately drawing you in because of the deep POV that Sidney Halston takes from the beginning. We’re plunged straight into the nightmarish cages of a mentally-ill woman, and like her, we struggle, unable to breathe in these ever-tightening circles, until she falls onto the couch of Panic’s owner, who, admittedly stays an unsympathetic arse about her condition for quite a while because of his own hang-ups. Despite the budding romance and the steamy sex scenes, I do feel that the story is more of a woman’s personal journey through this illness than the relationship that develops almost incidentally with Nick, seeing as her story is that of the everyday ‘hero’ – people who overcome the slightest challenges that ‘normal’ people deem insignificant and think they’ve scaled Everest.

I didn’t find myself as invested in Katherine or Nick together for some reason, yet I couldn’t put the book down, which makes it all the more puzzling. It did however, get exciting towards the end and with a partial cliffie for an ending, it’s pretty obvious that the next book would be about Matt and that very mysterious woman with shifting identities.